Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010) 705715

Copyright  2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISSN: 1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01089.x

Cognitive Ecology
Edwin Hutchins
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego
Received 2 March 2009; received in revised form 7 September 2009; accepted 23 October 2009

Abstract
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the
web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were
taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibsons ecological psychology,
Batesons ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in
those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition.
As cognitive theory continues to shift from units of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science.
Keywords: Units of analysis for cognition; Ecological psychology; Ecology of mind; Activity theory;
Embodied cognition; Situated cognition; Distributed cognition; Brainbodyworld systems; Human
culture

1. Choosing units of analysis for cognition

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. Elements of cognitive
ecology have been present in various corners, but not the core, of cognitive science since
the birth of the field. It is now being rediscovered as cognitive science shifts from viewing
cognition as a logical process to seeing it as a biological phenomenon.
Everything is connected to everything else. Fortunately, not all connectivity is
equally dense. The nonuniformity of connectivity makes science possible. Choosing the
right boundaries for a unit of analysis is a central problem in every science and the
basic approach to this problem has been in place for 2,000 years. Plato advised that
one should carve nature at its joints (Phaedrus 265d266a). By this, Plato meant that
Correspondence should be sent to Edwin Hutchins, Department of Cognitive Science, University of
California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515. E-mail: ehutchins@ucsd.edu

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we should place the boundaries of our units where connectivity is relatively low. To
speak of cognitive ecology is to employ an obvious metaphor, that cognitive systems
are in some specific way like biological systems. In particular, it points to the web of
mutual dependence among the elements of an ecosystem. Batesons (1972) Steps to an
Ecology of Mind is an extended argument for the idea that just as a full understanding
of biological organisms must include their relations to other organisms and physical
conditions in their environments;1 so, an understanding of cognitive phenomena must
include a consideration of the environments in which cognitive processes develop and
operate. Bateson showed how the loops that define mind extend through the body and
out into the surrounding cognitive ecosystem. He reiterated Platos advice with a cybernetic twist, urging us not to put delimiting lines where they cut important information
circuits. Bateson famously illustrated this principle with a thought experiment; the case
of the blind man with a stick. Bateson said,
Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my
mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start
halfway of the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway
along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways
in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece
of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then for this purpose, you will need
the street, the stick, the man, the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. (1972:459;
Form, Substance and Difference)
Bateson touched on the same topic in another essay. Speaking about a communicational
world as a wide network of pathways of messages, he noted that,
Some of these pathways happen to be located outside the physical individual, others
inside; but the characteristics of the system are in no way dependent upon any boundary
lines which we may superpose upon the communicational map. (1972:251; Minimal
Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia)
Every boundary placement makes some things easy to see, and others impossible to see.
The danger of putting boundaries in the wrong place is, as Bateson warned, that doing so
will leave important phenomena unexplained, or worse, inexplicable. Infelicitous boundary
placement can create paradoxes and problems that cannot be solved. Platos advice is, alas,
easier to state than to follow. Every theory implies a set of ontological commitments and
every ontological commitment emphasizes some kinds of connections over others. What
looks like low connectivity under one theory may look like a region of high connectivity to
another theory. As we tend to look where our theories indicate areas of interest, by looking
in particular ways, we actually make the world appear to be the kind of place that our theories can address. This is clear in the history of cognitive science. What we think cognition is
depends on what our theoretical commitments suggest can be explained. The question

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facing the field is not Which approach is true? but Which approach gives us the best
scientific leverage?
Early cognitive science was shaped by the tension between reductionism and holism. In
the late 1950s, two very different approaches, cybernetic and information processing,
focused on different images of mind.2 Cyberneticists like Bateson were interested in information, but they emphasized the fact that the information loops that constitute mind extend
through the body into the world. This view forced an acknowledgment of the roles of the
body and the world in thinking. Meanwhile, advocates of an information processing
approach saw the digital computer as a model of mind and sought to explain cognition by
reduction to internal symbolic events. They declared the body and its perceptual and motor
systems to be peripheral to central cognition.
The information processing view triumphed in North America and quickly made some
difficult choices concerning its unit of analysis. Gardner (1987) points out that while everyone agreed that culture, context, history, and affect were important aspects of cognition, taking them into account made the project too difficult. These things were set aside with the
intention to return to them once the project of understanding the core of cognition was well
established. It was hoped that the connections between these phenomena and the central
cognitive processor were sufficiently sparse that it would be safe to ignore them. Of course,
a theory of cognition that excludes culture, context, history and affect will effectively
exclude the study of cognitive ecology. Cognitive science is now returning to these issues.
The return is made possible by a combination of advances in understandings of how brains
work and increasingly powerful demonstrations of the involvement of body and world in the
constitution of the human mind. It might be thought that advances in brain science would
only feed the cognition as internal operation approach. However, as the brain is increasingly seen as a controller of a body rather than as a computer implemented in meat (Clark,
2001, 2008), the relations of brain processes to bodily interactions with an environment
become more important. Sensory and motor processes are not peripheral to modern brain
science.

2. By the late 1970s

As cognitive science developed, a few research traditions committed to a cognitive ecosystem as the correct unit of analysis. As I do not have space to review them all, I will
describe just three of the most influential areas here.
2.1. Ecological psychology
By the time of the first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Gibson (1986) had
already spent three decades studying psychological processes in ecological context. His publication of the first edition of The ecological approach to visual perception came in 1979.
Gibson stressed that psychological processes could only be understood in terms of the
dynamic coupling between the animal and its environment. Gibson ridiculed the notion that

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visual perception could be understood by imposing patterns of light and dark on the retina
of an unmoving animal eye. He pointed out that perception involves action, and he tried to
show how information is carried in properties of experience that are invariant under the
transformations of action. The eyeheadbrainbody system registers the invariants in the
structure of ambient light (Gibson, 1986, p. 61). He examined the structure of the environment (but, alas, not the cultural environment). He emphasized the fact that our perceptual
systems have evolved in and are tuned to environments that offer a certain limited set of
invariants. Gibson was extremely ambitious and very confrontational. He taunted his
colleagues, saying of information processing approach to psychology, It will not do, and
the approach should be abandoned (Gibson, 1986, p. 238).
2.2. Ecology of mind
I have already mentioned Gregory Bateson. In addition to writing a theoretical manifesto
in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson was a key player in one of the most ambitious (and
least known!) projects in the history of social science. The anthropologist, Bateson, joined a
team that included the linguists McQuown and Hockett, facial expression and body language expert Birdwhistell, and psychotherapist Brosin in an attempt to document and analyze a brief stretch of interaction in a psychiatric interview. The project resulted in a report
titled The Natural History of an Interview (McQuown, Bateson, Birdwhistell, Brosin, &
Hockett, 1971). This five-volume 1,500-page manuscript consisted of one volume of discussion and four volumes of painstaking behavioral coding. The variety of expertise brought to
bear reveals the researchers understanding that human interaction is a profoundly multimodal and heterogeneous system. Their principal finding was that Nothing never happens.3 This observation was meant to highlight the fact that in culturally constructed social
interactions even refraining from all action is a meaningful behavior. The project addressed
many methodological problems that remain unsolved today. For example, how can multiple
simultaneously relevant and interacting aspects of a complex stream of behavior be recorded
and coded? They struggled with a theoretical problem; how are the patterns in all of these
aspects of behavior related to one another? The project was 40 years ahead of time and technology.
The key ideas of the cybernetic approach to cognition were also part of the foundation of
another influential line of research. The concept of autopoeisis as developed by Maturana
and Varela (1987) describes the self-organizing processes by which organisms maintain
themselves through coupling to their environments.
2.3. Cultural-historical activity theory
As the name implies, this approach grants culture and history central roles as theoretical
constructs. Rather than setting aside culture, context, history, and affect, this approach holds
that human thought develops in cultural context, shaped by historically contingent cultural
practices. According to Vygotsky (1978), in individual ontogenesis, all higher level psychological processes appear twice. They appear first as interpsychological process; a child

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participates with others in cultural practices and in that context enacts a shared psychological processes. With repeated experience, the child may internalize the interpsychological
processes which then become intrapsychological process. Because of its ties to Marxist
philosophy, cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) attended from the outset to the roles
of social, material, and institutional culture in the formation of thought. This approach
developed in the Soviet Union and was made accessible to the West via several traditions.
Michael Coles use of CHAT framework, beginning with work on thinking and literacy in
West Africa (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971; Cole & Scribner, 1974) and continuing
through his work on education in the United States (Cole, 1996) may have had the most
influence on cognitive science. Others introduced activity theory concepts to the study of
development and everyday cognition (Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Wertsch, 1985).
These approaches defined themselves in part by their opposition to the dominant form of
cognitivism as it was articulated in the late 1970s. The fact that they opposed a historically
important vision of cognitive science does not mean that they are necessarily estranged from
modern cognitive science. Ecological psychology, ecology of mind, and CHAT can be seen
as ancestors of a modern synthesis of cognitive ecology approaches.

3. Up to the present
The three areas described above were not entirely responsible for all of the relevant
developments in cognitive ecology that followed in the 30 years since the first meeting of
the Cognitive Science Society. Many strands of research and theorizing weave together. The
various developments form a complex intellectual ecology of mutual influences and reactions (Goldstone & Leydesdorff, 2006).
The heirs of Gibson live on in the field of ecological psychology. This approach focuses
on psychological phenomena as properties of animalenvironment systems. In order to
understand perception, one must understand the properties of the world to be perceived. To
understand action, one must understand both the motor systems and its interactions with the
world. A synergistic relationship grew up between ecological psychology and the development of the dynamical systems approach to cognition. The dynamicists emphasize that the
system that matters is the brain, body, and world coupled in motion (Kelso, 1995; Port &
van Gelder, 1995; Spivey, 2007; Thelen & Smith, 1994), while ecological psychologists
have borrowed analysis tools from dynamical systems theory (Kugler & Turvey, 1987;
Michaels & Carello, 1981). Such accounts have successfully modeled many perceptual and
motor processes. However, it is not clear whether high-level cognitive processes can be captured by more of the same kind of process. The heterogeneous nature of real-world human
action is a continuing challenge for dynamical system models.
Organismenvironment dynamics become agentenvironment interactions in embodied
robotics (Beer, 2008). These efforts explore the ways that agents can take advantage of
structure in the environment to do thinking without representation (Brooks, 1991). Gibsons
insights that perception is a form of action provided inspiration for a part of the philosophy
of embodied mind movement (Hurley, 1998; Rowlands, 2006). For these authors, perceptual

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experience is grounded in regularities in the relations between sensation and action. These
sensorimotor contingencies always entail interactions between an organism and its environment. The catchphrase for this line of work is, Perception is something we do, not something that happens to us (Noe, 2004). These approaches view organismenvironment
relations in terms of coupling, coordination, emergence, and self-organization rather than
the transduction of information across a barrier.
As the points of contact between organism and environment come to be seen as loci of
essential processes rather than as barriers and boundaries to be crossed, the role of the body
in thinking comes to the fore. These ideas are being explored in two related contemporary
approaches to cognition. In North America, embodied cognition is on the rise. In Europe the
enaction perspective covers similar ground but from a different intellectual background.
Embodied cognition grounds high-level conceptual processes in bodily experiences
(Barsalou, this issue; Calvo & Gomila, 2008; Gibbs, 2006; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Nunez,
2000; Pfeifer & Bongard, 2007). One of the virtues of this approach is that emotion finds a
natural connection to conceptualization through processes in the body. A subfield of embodied cognition examines the relations between gesture and thought (Goldin-Meadow, 2003;
McNeill, 2000, 2005). Gesture studies highlight the coordination of talk with bodily action,
demonstrating the multimodal nature of communication (Hutchins & Nomura, in press).
In Europe, the enaction perspective combines the philosophy of phenomenology
(Dreyfus, 1982; Heidegger, 1962; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) with the cybernetic
approach that we saw in the ecology of mind (Bateson, 1972; Dupuy, 2000). Building on
the biological concept of autopoeisis (Maturana & Varela, 1987), the enaction perspective
emphasizes that environments are not pregiven but are in a fundamental sense created by
the activity of the organism (Havelange, Lenay, & Stewart, 2003; Kirsh, 1995). The processes of life and those of cognition are tightly linked in this view (Thompson, 2007).
Both embodiment and enaction stress the tight relation between thought and action (Alac
& Hutchins, 2004; Hutchins, 2010). Enaction shares with the dynamical systems approaches
a commitment to circular rather than linear causality, self-organization, and the structural
coupling of organism and environment.
Paying attention to the ways that the body and mind are coupled to the environment highlights two forms of multimodality. Interactions between persons and their environments
often simultaneously engage several modalities, speech and gesture, for example. It is now
clear that inside the brain as well, the causal factors that explain the patterns seen in any one
modality may lie partly in the patterns of other modalities. In fact, recent work suggests that
activity in various cortical areas (e.g., visual and motor cortex, or visual and auditory cortex)
unfolds in a complex system of mutual causality (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Sporns & Zwi,
2004; Wilson, Saygin, Sereno, & Iacoboni, 2004). Neuroscientists have thus become aware
of the need to expand the boundaries of the unit of analysis to consider a wider cognitive
ecology. In a review of psychophysiological methods Kutas and Federmeier say, the
complexity problem presented by the mindbrainbody system may require new ways of
thinking about the kinds of measures we use and need to use because, in fact, the mind
arises in a physical system that is distributed over space and time (Kutas & Federmeier,
1998).

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Activity theory with its emphasis on the social construction of thought inspired other
approaches that consider the cognitive consequences of social and cultural configurations
(Daniels, Cole, & Wertsch, 2007). Activity theory is the direct ancestor of the situated
action perspective (Greeno & Moore, 1993; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff,
2003; Suchman, 1987). With its emphasis on the interconnections of developmental processes on all timescales (phylogenetic, cultural, ontogenetic, and microgenetic), activity theory has been put to work by educational researchers as well (Greeno, 1998; Pea, 1996).
The rise of connectionism two decades ago not only transformed theories of mental representation and processing, it also spawned a wider investigation of emergent phenomena at
the supraindividual level. There is now a growing literature on computational models of
social and cultural systems. The emergence of language from interactions among agents is a
particularly interesting area of research (Cangelosi & Parisi, 2002; Hazlehurst & Hutchins,
1998; Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998; Hutchins & Hazlehurst, 1995, 2002;
Hutchins & Johnson, 2009).
It is clear that the cognitive properties of groups can be quite different from the cognitive
properties of any individual in the group (Hutchins, 1995). The organizational principles
that determine the cognitive power of groups are now a hot topic (Sunstein, 2007;
Surowiecki, 2004). Barabasi (2002) describes powerful regularities that explain how
patterns of connectivity can change the cognitive properties of a network. The subtitle of
Barabasis book is How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for
science, business, and everyday life. Echoing the theme of this article, we once again see
that while everything is connected to everything else, the patterns in the density of interconnectivity determine cognitive properties of the system whether the system is an area of a
brain or a group of governmental agencies responding to a crisis.

4. The next 30 years

The boundaries of units of analysis have been expanding in many areas of cognitive science for some time, as researchers transition to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of
correlation across elements rather than in terms of the inherent properties of the elements
(Mandelblit & Zachar, 1998). Of course, this is exactly the approach that was advocated by
Bateson (1972). As the pursuit of cognitive phenomena leads scientists to cross the existing
boundaries of units of analysis the various approaches will increasingly overlap one another.
My hopeful prediction is that the reality of the rich interconnectivity of the brain, body, and
world will draw the many strands described here together into a coherent approach to mind
as a property of cognitive ecosystems.
One of the biggest challenges of the coming decades will be working out the implications
of the fact that for humans, the world (in the now familiar brainbodyworld formulation) consists of culturally constructed social and material settings. The advent of culture
is, after all, the transformative event in the history of the human mind (Donald, 1991;
Tomasello, 1999). The human brain and human culture have coevolved. The word culture
here is simply a shorthand way of referring to a complex cognitive ecosystem that includes,

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in addition to the brain, a large number of somatic and extrasomatic processes. When we
approach the question of the history of mind, the unit of analysis for mind must be the cultural cognitive ecosystem (Deacon, 1997; Jablonka & Lamb, 2005). Cognitive scientists
should ask themselves, When will it be safe to disregard this fact? When must we attend
to it? How should we attend to it?
How will the elements of the ecology that are outside the skull ever come to have relevance to the neural processes that take place inside the skull? The convergence of
approaches under the rubric of cognitive ecology is already suggesting an answer. Activity
in the nervous system is linked to high-level cognitive processes by way of embodied interaction with culturally organized material and social worlds (Hutchins, 2008).
Increased attention to real-world activity will change our notions of what are the canonical instances of cognitive process and which are special cases of more general phenomena.
For example, private disembodied thinking is undoubtedly an important kind of thinking,
but perhaps it receives more attention than it should. This mode of thinking is common
among academics and can sometimes be induced in experimental subjects, but it is relatively rare in the global cognitive ecology. It is also deceptive. Far from being free from the
influences of culture, private reflection is a deeply cultural practice that draws on and is
enacted in coordination with rich cultural resources. The focus of intellectual attention is
already shifting to the relations among action, interaction, and conceptualization. Perception, action, and thought will be understood to be inextricably integrated, each with the others. Human cognitive activity will increasingly be seen to be profoundly situated, social,
embodied, and richly multimodal. The products of interaction accumulate not only in the
brain but throughout the cognitive ecology.
As the field of cognitive ecology grows and matures, we will achieve a better understanding of why cognitive processes are as they are. This will be true both in a synchronic sense
in terms of the functional relationships among the elements of the contemporary cognitive
ecology, and also in a diachronic sense where understanding the evolution of cognition will
be recast as understanding the evolution of cognitive ecologies.

Notes
1. This point is beautifully made by Turner (2000) in his book The Extended Organism.
2. See (Dupuy, 2000), The Mechanization of the Mind: On the origins of cognitive science.
3. Well, except perhaps with respect to publication, as no publisher would take on the
manuscript.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Larry Barsalou and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this paper. Funding for this research was provided by NSF award
#0729013, A multiscale framework for analyzing activity dynamics.

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